As you must know by now, I’ve just written a book about public struggles over the meaning of a just society with an intriguing title, The Eclipse of Equality. The title is catchy, but it also a bit misleading. I know that many in my audience will gravitate toward or be repulsed by it based on our collective tendency to think about equality in the ways that we typically do, but there is an irony embedded in this title that I ought to explain or you will miss the whole point.

First, the standard story. What you likely imagine when I say that we have lived through an eclipse of equality is a story about the career of hatred in the modern world and the ways that dominant groups have used their hatred infused privilege to exploit and dominate others, even to the present day. Anticipating my turn to conversations about the economy, you might therefore expect that my book is about the enduring structural and systemic legacies of that hatred and our collective failure to address them. It is that book, in part, but the thesis also plays on a level beneath that common reading that qualifies and reframes the standard interpretation.

I argue that at the same time that we have become increasingly clever in recognizing the abusive powers of white, male, Christian, straight, abled privilege, we have forgotten how to think, feel and argue well about economic inequality thought of in its own terms. To suggest that there are enticing alternatives to be explored in comparative capitalisms comes off as odd and distracting in too many of our conversations. We have lived through an eclipse of the moral category of equality and this means that we have lost the ability to creatively imagine the world of material scarcity.

Consider this a family intervention: we need to face that we as a society no longer care much about economic equality. In fact, we’re kind of cool with the way things are playing out. Of course, we think we care about equality, but the way we talk about it proves that we really care about is just about anything but. When we speak about equality today, we always inflect it with other clarifying words that show where our red lines are drawn: tolerance, inclusion, identity and diversity. Read the rest of this entry »

In preparation for the release of my new book, The Eclipse of Equality: Arguing America on Meet the Press, I have decided to return to the blogging business. The central claim of that book is that we have lived through a temporary shift in political emphases in which equality, one of the canonical categories of the moral imagination, has been allowed to atrophy. When we speak about equality today, we tend not to speak about equality itself, understood in non-ascriptive and universalistic terms, but rather about tolerance, inclusion and diversity in terms of their points of intersection with equality per se–hence the vogue of intersectionality. Equality and tolerance are related principles, but they differ in relation to the abusive power they were designed to oppose. My book is worth a read, because this confusion of categories leaves us unprepared to deal with our most pressing problems like uncivil communication, democratic gridlock and soaring rates of inequality.

Let me explain what I mean with a story. Back when I was in graduate training to become a professional sociologist, I used to suggest to my students that they would soon live through the rise of the LGBT movement as the central civil rights cause of our day. Even liberal sociology students back then were typically skeptical of my claim and we often politely moved on to other topics. In my personal life, I thought that people ought to be more aware of the centrality of this cause and so, when I was invited to join the Human Rights Campaign some time around 2002, whose logo you see rotated above, I put the sticker they gave me up on a kitchen door just as you see it represented there. Perhaps I was thinking of 9/11 or maybe I just didn’t like being bothered with swag, but this logo hung orthogonal to its meaning in my house for some time. It never occurred to me to rotate it and read the message as equality for gay people, even though my major field of study was the study of inequality. The problem struck me not as one of a inequality, read class, but one of intolerance. I thought what was needed was something like tolerance for religious difference–safeguards against state establishment of heterosexuality and the prohibition of free exercise of alternative sexualities.